Blade enclosures are usually found installed in data centers. Data centers are usually remote installations where a few technicians handle the day-to-day operations of installing, removing, and monitoring the operations of systems. However, substantive monitoring is usually handled in an external manner. That is, the technicians have little knowledge of what programs are executing on the systems or how the systems are being used. Control over this information is the domain of system administrators who are usually located at a separate business site where the system administrators can easily interact with the end-users of these systems.
For security reasons, many data centers do not allow actual keyboard and monitors to be locally connected to the systems at the data centers, because these could provide an opening into the systems physical operations and allow unauthorized personnel to view data on the machines. Instead, full size computer monitors and keyboards at the business site are connected to the system through a remote network connection. Thus, the system administrator at the business site can stay abreast of what is happening on the system at the remote data center.
A variety of software tools are available to present information for the system administrator in various text and graphic displays. These tools allow the system administrator to readily determine which programs are running, who is using the system, how the system is operating, speed, temperature, usage capacity, etc. Unfortunately, some of this information may need to be made available to the technicians on site at the data center because the technicians have access to the physical equipment and are in a better position to fix some types of errors in the hardware operations of the system.
This information may be conveyed by colored lights and speaker tones which identify a failed component for the technician at the remote data center. For purposes of illustration, a flashing LED may identify a failed cooling fan for the technician. Since the entire machine runs together as a single unit, the technician may turn it off, make the repairs and bring the system back up. If the module failed, the system was already down, so having the technician turn off the system was of little consequence to the users. However, a flashing LED cannot differentiate between a failed component and a component that perhaps simply needs to be checked or quickly restarted. If the module did not fail and the technician shut down the entire system, such an interruption would be unacceptable to the end-users.